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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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It is a great pleasure to welcome you, members of the Class of 2004, to Yale College. It is also a special pleasure to welcome to the Yale family the parents, relatives, and friends who have proudly accompanied you here. You enter Yale at a special time, a year of commemoration and celebration. In October 1701 the General Assembly of the Colony of Connecticut enacted legislation to establish a Collegiate School. Within a month, the Trustees of new School elected a rector, Abraham Pierson, and settled upon a location in Saybrook. A few months later, the Collegiate School—subsequently renamed and relocated—welcomed its first student, and, since then, new students have enrolled every autumn. This makes you, the women and men of the Class of 2004, the 300th class to enter Yale College. You, and Yale, reach this milestone in a special year marked by three zeros, a millennial year that remains an occasion for reflection on the passage and significance of time. This summer I attended a remarkable conference in Cambridge, England, where humanists and scientists came together to discuss the subject of calendars. Experts on Greek and Roman, Chinese, Islamic, Mayan, and Amazonian cultures described the workings of the various calendrical systems used by those societies, illustrating how the measurement of time at once reinforced and influenced the prevailing institutions of civil and religious governance. In a well-wrought example, a musicologist explained how Gregorian chant was a time machine, a calendar using the annual cycle of religious observance to connect past and future to the present. From several distinguished scientists, we learned four valuable lessons. First, in thinking about time, scale matters. Evolutionary changes in humans and other complex organisms occur very quickly when measured on the scale of geological time, but they occur far too slowly for us to see them happening during the course of a human lifetime. Second, in astronomy, distance is a measure of time. The farther we look into space, the deeper we probe into the history of the universe. Third, we have made astonishing progress in the precision with which we measure time. In the mid-18th century, John Harrison’s prize-winning chronometer had an accuracy of six seconds in a month. Today’s atomic clocks are pushing toward an accuracy of one minute over the entire history of the universe, roughly 1.5 quadrillion years. Finally, the human body has an internal clock, geared to the cycle of night and day. From the study of these so-called “circadian rhythms” one result emerges of undeniable importance to you—you will perform better, even at age 18, if you get a good night’s sleep. These scientific findings underscore that calendars, and the scales upon which time is conceived and measured, have a basis in nature, but they are also social institutions, which is to say they are human creations. This seems obvious enough when one asks the question: why is this the year 2000, and not the year 6004 as Bishop Usher would have had it, or 1490 as the Mayans would have had it, or 211, as Robespierre and his fellow French revolutionaries would have had it? One commentator at the Cambridge conference reminded us that William Wordsworth understood the contingency of measuring time; he recognized that the calendar could be created anew by an act of will. In his beautiful lyric poem entitled “Lines written at a small distance from my house, and sent by my little boy to the person to whom they are addressed,” Wordsworth beckons his sister Dorothy to hasten outdoors to experience the warmth of “the first mild day of March: each minute sweeter than before.” He declares:
Today, in marking your matriculation at Yale, we are, in our own way, engaging in an act as outrageous as Wordsworth's. His year began on the “the first mild day of March;” yours begins today. For the next four years, your lives will follow patterns both cyclical and linear that constitute nothing less than your own distinctive calendar. Welcome, Class of 2004, to Yale Time. Yale Time shapes in its own unique ways the nature of the day, the week, and the year, as well as the entire four years of its duration. Let me take each of these in turn. In Yale Time, the day (at least the weekday) has four parts: classes, extracurricular activities, study, and hanging out, generally in that sequence, although sometimes (I hope not too often) the hanging out part starts early in the evening and displaces the study portion of the day. Each part of this daily cycle is an essential element of the Yale experience. You have an extraordinary array of classes to choose from, over 1,800 courses in all, covering virtually every subject on the map of human knowledge. There are extracurricular activities to suit every one of you—from intercollegiate and intramural athletics to journalism to music and drama to community service, to name just a few possibilities. Each of these is an opportunity to learn to work with others, to develop your talents to the full extent, and to test your capacity for leadership. Classes and activities will keep you busier than you can now imagine, but you will also need time for reading, writing, and reflection. Here you will find Yale’s resources not just adequate but staggering. There are ten million books at your disposal, most of them housed in the Sterling Library—a Gothic cathedral of learning. Beyond this, you have access to rich collections of papers and manuscripts, two of the finest university art museums in the world, a magnificent natural history museum, and abundant computing facilities. And we don’t underestimate the importance of just hanging out. Your classmates come from 48 states and 44 countries around the world, and the lessons you will learn from one another, the lifelong friendships you will form, are no less important than the lessons taught in the classroom. In Yale Time, the week has its own special rhythm as well, a cycle that repeats itself through the whole semester and then starts over again. At the Yale Daily News, there are five frantic nights each week (Sunday through Thursday), as the editors work long hours to put the next morning’s edition “to bed.” Athletes live, in their seasons, in a cycle of practice, practice, practice, game. For the Yale Symphony Orchestra, the a cappella singing groups, the Yale Dramat, and residential college players, the cycle is a little different: rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, then a 'round the clock frenzy of final preparation, then performance. For the students in Directed Studies, Thursday nights require the rigorous exercise of writing a paper, but the exercise is often deferred until they finish reading the 600-page book they are writing about. In Yale Time, the year passes by in two repeated cycles, with the long summer marking a transition to the next. Each semester begins with the luxurious practice known as the “shopping period,” during which you can sample just about as many courses as you can fit into your day before settling on a final schedule. In these early weeks you will find yourself gradually adding extracurricular commitments, generally thriving until midterm examinations come into view. Then you temporarily panic when you wonder, with all that I now have to do, how will I ever make it through the semester? Then midterms come and go. The pressure eases. You start to enjoy the challenge of writing a term paper or two, even as extracurricular deadlines approach—a performance by the elementary school children you have been tutoring, an article due in a campus publication, a decisive intramural game. Then, just as the fun is beginning, it’s time to finish those term papers and study for final exams. The semester ends with a sense of wonder (How did I ever make it through all those courses and outside activities?), a sense of accomplishment (I made it through all those courses and activities!), and a sense of regret (What a great semester! I wish I could do it all over again.). Yale Time is cyclical and repetitive, but it is also linear, moving inevitably forward, in a logical progression, to a conclusion. Each of the four years has a name of its own. As you move forward in the progression of years, more will be expected of you, building on what has gone before. As freshmen you will choose your courses from a large menu, cover distribution requirements, and explore a few areas of potential interest. As sophomores, you will try out a few more subjects, broadening the scope of your knowledge even as you choose a major. Some of you, especially those committed to science or engineering, will need to make an early decision about a major, but many of you will keep your options open all year. As juniors, you will dig in, probing deeply into your chosen major, gaining sophistication, and occasionally pausing to reflect on how much you are learning here. As seniors you will undertake independent research under the close supervision of a faculty adviser—a scientific project, a senior essay, or a major seminar paper. The same progression occurs in extracurricular pursuits. As a first-semester freshman, you hang around the Daily News hoping for an assignment; you get one or two stories in the spring. As a sophomore you are assigned to a regular beat, and as a junior you are elected to the editorial board. Or you sit on the bench as a freshman, get into a few games as a sophomore, become a starter as junior, and a team leader as a senior. In Yale Time, your four years are a linear progression, containing repeated cycles within them, but they are also a whole, a unity. Taken together, they will be your Yale Time—four years that will occupy a special place in your memories as long as you live. You will never forget that first meeting with a lifelong friend, that amazing victory at the Harvard game, that professor who first inspired your interest in cosmology, or Chinese history, or pre-Columbian art, or robotics. You are the most promising young people of your generation, and you will realize, perhaps not now, but later in life, that these four years are a rare privilege—a privilege that you have worked hard to earn, but a privilege nonetheless. Yale provides you with four years of almost unimaginable freedom—freedom to discover who you are through encounter with classmates so very different but equally talented, freedom to discover what most interests and motivates you. In Yale Time, your four years are very much your own. They will be rich, rewarding, and intensely personal, and the Yale that shapes them, however durable its three centuries makes it, will be, in Proust’s words “as fugitive, alas, as the years.” You will return to campus after your Yale Time is over, perhaps every five years at reunions, and although you will find Yale familiar, it will not be the same place because it is not the same time. As Proust discovered when he returned to the Bois de Boulogne, “[i]t sufficed that Mme. Swann did not appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered.” Your Yale, like Proust’s Bois de Boulogne, exists as a place only in time, and, once you graduate, it will persist only in memory. Your Yale Time begins now. It will be yours to remember for a lifetime. Seize it. Enjoy it. Make the most of it. |
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